Comparison of Car-Following Models: A Vehicle Fuel Consumption and Emissions Estimation Perspective

The Rakha-Pasumarthy-Adjerid (RPA) car-following model has been demonstrated to successfully replicate empirical driver car-following behavior. However, the validity of this model for fuel consumption and emission (FC/EM) estimation has yet to be studied. This paper attempts to address this research need by analyzing the applicability of the model for FC/EM estimation and comparing its performance to other state-of-practice car-following models; namely, the Gipps, Fritzsche and Wiedemann models. Naturalistic empirical data are employed to generate ground truth car-following events. The model-generated Vehicle Specific Power (VSP) distributions are then compared to the empirical distributions. The study demonstrates that the generation of realistic VSP distributions is critical in producing accurate FC/EM estimates and that the RPA model outperforms the other car-following models in producing realistic VSP distributions and robust FC/EM estimates. This study also demonstrates that the acceleration modeling within car-following models is the major contributor to producing realistic VSP distributions. The study further demonstrates that the use of trip-aggregated results may produce erroneous conclusions given that second-by-second errors may cancel each other out, and that lower VSP distribution errors occasionally result in greater bias in FC/EM estimates given the large deviation of the distribution at high VSP levels. Finally, the results of the study demonstrate the validity of the INTEGRATION microsimulator in generating realistic VSP distributions, and thus in estimating fuel consumption and emission levels.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC20 Standing Committee on Transportation and Air Quality.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Wang, Jinghui
  • Rakha, Hesham A
  • 0000-0002-5845-2929
  • Fadhloun, Karim
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 22p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Behavior; Car following; Driving; Estimating; Fuel consumption; Pollutants
• Subject Areas: Energy; Environment; Highways;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01623405
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-01158
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 24 2017 3:32PM